25th Annual Farm Journal Crop Tour Starts Next Week

The 25th annual Farm Journal Midwest Crop Tour starts next Monday, August 21st and every year the participants take on the challenging task of guessing the nation’s corn and soybean harvest. Farm fields were impacted by a variety of weather extremes this year, from drought in the Upper Midwest to too much rain in the eastern Corn Belt during the spring. Crop scouts will share their reports daily during the four-day tour. “Our job is to peg potential yield numbers to these really varied conditions we’re seeing out there this summer,” says Chip Flory, Editorial Director for Farm Journal Pro. More than 100 growers, industry experts, and media will scout more than 2,000 fields in seven Midwestern states. The eastern leg of the tour will start scouting in western Ohio before working its way through Indiana, Illinois, eastern Iowa, and southern Minnesota. The western leg begins in southern South Dakota before traveling across eastern Nebraska, western Iowa, and into southern Minnesota. Flory says they’ll pull enough samples to provide accurate data from a large geographical area. “The crop tour doesn’t predict results for individual fields or even a county,” Flory adds, “but we do want to have a good handle on each of the seven states we